Algorithms may be used to combine information from two or more biometric modalities. The combined information may allow for more reliable and more accurate identification of an individual than is possible with systems based on a single biometric modality. The combination of information from more than one biometric modality is sometimes referred to herein as “biometric fusion”.
Reliable personal authentication is becoming increasingly important. The ability to accurately and quickly identify an individual is important to immigration, law enforcement, computer use, and financial transactions. Traditional security measures rely on knowledge-based approaches, such as passwords and personal identification numbers (“PINs”), or on token-based approaches, such as swipe cards and photo identification, to establish the identity of an individual. Despite being widely used, these are not very secure forms of identification. For example, it is estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars are lost annually in credit card fraud in the United States due to consumer misidentification.
Biometrics offers a reliable alternative for identifying an individual. Biometrics is the method of identifying an individual based on his or her physiological and behavioral characteristics. Common biometric modalities include fingerprint, face recognition, hand geometry, voice, iris and signature verification. The Federal government will be a leading consumer of biometric applications deployed primarily for immigration, airport, border, and homeland security. Wide scale deployments of biometric applications such as the US-VISIT program are already being done in the United States and else where in the world.
Despite advances in biometric identification systems, several obstacles have hindered their deployment. Every biometric modality has some users who have illegible biometrics. For example a recent NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) study indicates that nearly 2 to 5% of the population does not have legible fingerprints. Such users would be rejected by a biometric fingerprint identification system during enrollment and verification. Handling such exceptions is time consuming and costly, especially in high volume scenarios such as an airport. Using multiple biometrics to authenticate an individual may alleviate this problem.
Furthermore, unlike password or PIN based systems, biometric systems inherently yield probabilistic results and are therefore not fully accurate. In effect, a certain percentage of the genuine users will be rejected (false non-match) and a certain percentage of impostors will be accepted (false match) by existing biometric systems. High security applications require very low probability of false matches. For example, while authenticating immigrants and international passengers at airports, even a few false acceptances can pose a severe breach of national security. On the other hand false non matches lead to user inconvenience and congestion.
Existing systems achieve low false acceptance probabilities (also known as False Acceptance Rate or “FAR”) only at the expense of higher false non-matching probabilities (also known as False-Rejection-Rate or “FRR”). It has been shown that multiple modalities can reduce FAR and FRR simultaneously. Furthermore, threats to biometric systems such as replay attacks, spoofing and other subversive methods are difficult to achieve simultaneously for multiple biometrics, thereby making multimodal biometric systems more secure than single modal biometric systems.
Systematic research in the area of combining biometric modalities is nascent and sparse. Over the years there have been many attempts at combining modalities and many methods have been investigated, including “Logical And”, “Logical Or”, “Product Rule”, “Sum Rule”, “Max Rule”, “Min Rule”, “Median Rule”, “Majority Vote”, “Bayes' Decision”, and “Neyman-Pearson Test”. None of these methods has proved to provide low FAR and FRR that is needed for modern security applications.
The need to address the challenges posed by applications using large biometric databases is urgent. The US-VISIT program uses biometric systems to enforce border and homeland security. Governments around the world are adopting biometric authentication to implement National identification and voter registration systems. The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains national criminal and civilian biometric databases for law enforcement.
Although large-scale databases are increasingly being used, the research community's focus is on the accuracy of small databases, while neglecting the scalability and speed issues important to large database applications. Each of the example applications mentioned above require databases with a potential size in the tens of millions of biometric records. In such applications, response time, search and retrieval efficiency also become important in addition to accuracy.